'Breaking Bad' Creator Predicts Jesse's Fate

By JACKIE WILLIS

November 26, 2013

In the highly acclaimed series finale of Breaking Bad, TV's favorite drug dealer Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) escapes death and drives off into the night, but what's next for Walter White's sidekick? Show creator Vince Gilligan has some ideas.

But don't get your hopes up Jesse fans! The show runner adds, "But the most likely thing, as negative as this sounds, is that they’re going to find this kid’s fingerprints all over this lab and they’re going to find him within a day or a week or a month. And he’s still going to be on the hook for the murder of two federal agents. But yeah, even though that’s the most likely outcome, the way I see it is that he got away and got to Alaska, changed his name, and had a new life. You want that for the kid. He deserves it."

As for the show's anti-hero Walter White (Bryan Cranston), even Gilligan himself admits that he was on the bad guy's side. "Oddly enough, I think I started to root for Walt a little more in the final couple of episodes," he confesses. "I would argue he did the most nasty, sadistic thing he had ever done in our third-from-final episode, where he says to Jesse, 'I watched Jane die.' But in that same episode, he also did a couple of the kindest and most selfless things he had ever done. That episode really encompassed the duality of this character. He could be good, and he could be bad."

As for why he thinks Breaking Bad did so well, Gilligan says he really has no idea. "We worked our butts off, but everybody works their butts off in TV. We tried to make the best show it was humanly possible to make, but you know, the guys on According to Jim did the same thing. As to why this thing hit ...I could make up some stream of nonsense, but honestly ...I wish I could explain it, because then I might have a fighting chance on TV in the future. The truth is, I just have to be satisfied that it happened at all."